Eating a Bigger Breakfast Promotes Weight Loss and Overall Health

The foods you choose on a daily basis impact all aspects of your health including weight gain, weight loss, your energy level and disease.  It’s probably not news to you that by choosing nutritious foods and eating well-balanced meals you can achieve great health.  Though this holds a lot of truth, recent research conducted by Tel Aviv University suggests that when you eat has a similar impact on these factors as what you eat.

In the study, 93 obese women were separated into two groups: one group consumed their largest meal of the day at breakfast and the other consumed their largest meal of the day at dinner.  Both groups consumed the exact same foods and ate a total of 1400 calories a day.  After 12 weeks, the women in the “bigger” breakfast group lost almost 3 times more weight than the women in the “bigger” dinner group, suggesting that eating your biggest meal of the day at breakfast versus at dinner yields greater weight loss.  Even more interesting was that the women in the bigger breakfast group did not experience high blood glucose spikes that usually occur after each meal and they had larger decreases in insulin, triglycerides and glucose.

The explanation that surrounds the findings is that those in the bigger breakfast group had significantly lower levels of ghrelin, the hunger-regulating hormone that makes you feel like you need to eat.  This indicates that these people were more satiated and would have less desire to snack throughout the day compared to those in the bigger dinner group.

The findings from this study support the idea that eating more calories at breakfast than at lunch or dinner promotes weight loss and helps lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.  It is important to understand that what you eat and when you eat work synergistically.  The research supports that eating nutritious foods at the wrong time can still hinder weight loss progress, even though the foods you are eating are good for you.  Therefore it proves the importance of not just knowing what foods to eat, but knowing how when you eat them can work to your healthy advantage.

You already knew that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, so the task now becomes making it you’re largest meal full of “good for you” foods!  So enjoy a big breakfast that will have you going strong all day long!

Your turn to take action: How do you feel about incorporating big breakfasts into your lifestyle?

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